As the government says it’s working towards a ‘deconfinement’ strategy, this has given rise to a debate. On the one side are those saying it’s too soon for the economy to reopen, citing the risk of a second wave of the coronavirus, on those wanting to kick start the economy as soon as possible, their critics accusing them of being stooges of the private sector putting profit before people. The choice then is between health and wealth. Much ink has been spilt in newspapers framing the question in this way, and much bandwidth by politicians doing the same. 

Too bad it’s a bit of a false dichotomy. The first problem is, of course, it’s not just capitalists and the private sector having a problem with the lockdown. You see, over the decades after the retreat of mass-employing industries such as sugar and textiles, successive governments have felt comfortable with the emergence of a large informal sector to soak up workers laid off from these two industries.  These are the very people – along with those in SME, retail shops, etc. – that have the valid concern that the longer the lockdown continues, the higher the chances of them becoming casualties of a damaged economy. Already, 973 of them have lost their jobs since the lockdown began while the rest have to make do for half of April with Rs2,550 at a time when the government has handed out 1,689 contraventions to traders and supermarkets for profiteering and price gouging. It’s peculiarly tone-deaf to say in such a context that it’s only profit-hungry capitalists chafing under the lockdown. 

The other issue is, of course, that everybody seems to be demanding something. Everyone now wants more investments in the health system and better equipment to fight Covid and prevent a future outbreak. But a functioning quality health system needs a functioning economy to pay for it. Everybody wants an expanded testing programme afterwards. Since we don’t produce the equipment, we need the economy to produce the dollars to pay to bring that in too. The unions want a programme of relief work (à la the late 1970s) and economists are calling for temporary unemployment benefits for those laid off. In this secular age, manna no longer rains from heaven. The closest thing we have to it is government funding. Unless this increased spending is actually backed by economic activity, it’s a recipe for Mauritius turning into Zimbabwe, Yugoslavia or Weimar Germany. In other words, even to prevent Covid properly, taking the economy out of the deep-freeze is actually a prerequisite for anything to work. This is not health vs wealth. This is actually, you cannot have one without the other. 

Some are already saying that the pandemic has opened everyone’s eyes to the need for a “new dawn” where people matter more than profit. This is a little premature (the profiteering under the lockdown does not give cause for such rosy optimism) and the greater likelihood is that of a more generalised version of what happened after 2000 when 74,000 workers were suddenly thrown out of work as sugar and textiles tottered.  There were few “New Dawns” back then. 

At the risk of sounding like a capitalist stooge, the insistence on getting the economy back on track is not a betrayal of the fight against Covid; its actually an essential first step in helping ensure it does not mutate into something much uglier.